It was an historic moment when Vicente Fox took the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe,
the patron saint of Mexico, from two of his children a few days before accepting the
presidential nomination of the conservative National Action Party (PAN). In a victorious
campaign that on July 2 sent the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) down to defeat
after 71 years in power, religion would play a more prominent role than ever before in a
Mexican presidential election.

Fox blithely ignored the cultural tabooas well as the legal
prohibitionagainst using religious symbols in political campaigns. Before the third
presidential debate in May, for example, he made a show of praying at the Basilica of
Guadalupe. Nor did he seek merely to capitalize on his Catholic devotion to present
himself as a candidate with strong moral values. For the first time in Mexican history, a
presidential candidate explicitly formulated a religion policy to ease restrictions on the
activities of the Catholic Church.

For its part, the Church had never before been so visible during a presidential
campaign, organizing religious events to express its views on the political situation of
the country. For the first time since 1924, it held a National Eucharistic Congress, which
culminated with an in-your-face open air mass outside the cathedral in Mexico Citys
main plaza. Ceremonies were mounted for the canonization of 27 martyrs from the
anti-government Cristero War of the late 1920s. And bishops began holding regular press
conferences, at which they commented regularly on campaign developments.

In March, the Mexican bishops issued "From the Encounter with Jesus Christ to
Solidarity with All," a pastoral letter that was the most comprehensive document on
social and political issues that the Mexican Church had issued in three decades. In it,
the bishops asserted that "a full democratic culture is [only] compatible with the
real possibility of alternation in power." This was a clear sign to politicians, the
media, and the intelligentsia that the Church was ready to accept a PRI defeat and
therefore also a sign of support for Fox.

Outsiders might imagine it to be utterly unremarkable that, in the second largest Roman
Catholic country in the world, the Church should make its views known in a presidential
campaign and that a candidate, portraying himself as a devout Catholic, should attend
Sunday Mass and take communion. But Mexicans have been ruled by one of the most
anticlerical political elites of the Western Hemisphere, thanks to a highly conflictual
national history of church and state.

The conflict has its roots in the independence movement of the 1810s, when the Church
opposed the insurrection against the Spanish Crown; continued during the Reform War of the
1860s, in which liberals triumphed over conservative forces opposed to separation of the
Church from the Mexican state; and crystallized after the Revolution of 1910, when a
liberal and profoundly anticlerical Congress drafted a new Constitution (1917) that
responded to the Churchs support for counterrevolutionary forces by stripping it of
its juridical personality. This constitutional provisionthe infamous Article
130was a political weapon meant to prevent the Church from ever questioning the
legitimacy of a regime that would not tolerate any competition in popular organizing. (At
the time, the Church was influential in the labor movement and had the capacity to
influence the vast illiterate masses against the new state.)

The Cristero War, in which an estimated 250,000 people died, was a civil insurrection
inspired by what was seen by the bishops as religious intolerance on the part of the
Plutarco Elas Calles presidential administration (1924-1928). The war firmly established
anticlericalism as a fundamental characteristic of the Mexican state for the rest of the
century. Indeed, no other Latin American country has a record of civil conflict in which
the Catholic Church was the protagonist.

Even today, after Constitutional reforms and legislation in 1991 and 1992 accorded
"religious associations" a legal personality and gave the clergy the right to
vote, the former are still prohibited from owning their own media and the latter may not
openly criticize public institutions or public policy. All in all, religious issues in
Mexico are discussed not, as in the United States, as abstract questions of "free
exercise" and "establishment," but in terms of how much political power the
Catholic Church can muster to recover the privileges it lost in its ancient battles
against the state. Of the issues on the agenda of religious conservatives in the United
Statesabortion, gay rights, prayer in public schools, public funding for religious
schoolsonly abortion can be found in Mexicos political arena. And in the
presidential campaign, abortion was a nonissue, despite efforts by the Left to make it
one. Not until after the election, when the legislature of Foxs home state of
Guanajuato voted to eliminate all restrictions on abortion, did a public debate on the
subject take place. (Under intense political pressure, the governor finally vetoed the
legislation.)

For decades, the strict exclusion of religion from the public schools, the restrictions
on the Churchs political activities, and the ban on Church-owned media have been
considered a treasured legacy of 19th-century liberalism by the Mexican
political, intellectual, and media elite. Among this elite, it is a widely shared view
that the Church must limit itself to the "spiritual sphere"that it should
not even express public views on social issues, much less political ones.

This anticlerical posture has, in fact, left most journalists poorly prepared to report
on the Churchs religious and political concerns. Many, indeed, are ignorant of the
basic facts of Church organization. For example, the Archbishop of Mexico City is often
portrayed as the "boss" of the Catholic Church in Mexico, as if he wielded power
over the countrys 14 other archbishops. In Mexico, religious liberty is understood
merely as freedom of belief. Journalists have little appreciation of the rights of people
to behave religiously, including through organized religious bodies.

Lacking the North American tradition of investigative journalism, Mexican reporters
focus their attention on searching for what is known as la notaa statement
that provokes controversy. Thus, reporters on the religion beat see their job as eliciting
statements from bishops and other well-known clergy that will have sufficient impact to
make other public actors (public officials, political party leaders, other bishops)
respond in kind. During federal elections, and especially during presidential campaigns, a
favorite journalistic game is to get a bishop to comment on politics or public policy. So
much the better if he displays support for a particular party or candidate, because this
would violate the law and therefore put pressure on the government (i.e., the
Undersecretary for Religious Affairs) to enforce the prohibition.

When Cuauhtmoc Crdenas, the presidential candidate of the left-wing Party of the
Democratic Revolution (PRD)who is well known for his self-professed
atheismvisited Cardinal Norberto Rivera at Mexico Citys cathedral, even so
competent a religion reporter as Jos Antonio Romn of La Jornada, the leading
newspaper among Mexican intellectuals, contented himself with asking the cardinal if he
had blessed the candidate. "It is of public knowledge that Mr. Crdenas does not
practice our religion," the cardinal declared. "Hence, a sign so that we can all
live together in Mexico is tolerance. There is a profound respect and admiration for Mr.
Crdenas; I wish him well during his campaign for the presidency."

The most notorious example of this modus operandi during the campaign came in a
telephone interview that a reporter for Reforma (a Mexico City daily that actually
does investigative journalism) had with Genaro Alamilla, the bishop emeritus of Papantla
who became well known in the 1980s for making public statements defying the law against
political criticism. This happened a month before the election, amid accusations that the
PRI was making political support a condition of assistance to flood victims in Chalco, a
municipality famous as the symbol of the social policy of former president Carlos Salinas
de Gortari. Bishop Alamilla told Reforma that the victims should accept assistance
from the government but asked that they preserve their dignity as citizens by voting for
any party other than the PRI. The Interior Ministry proceeded to ask the Bishop "to
explain" his statement, then announced that the affair was over after an exchange of
letters "clarifying" the "misunderstanding." This trivial episode was
front-page news in La Jornada. El Universal, another Mexico City daily,
reported that the bishop said that he was ready to go to jail if necessary.

The event that most clearly disclosed the presss view of religion and politics
was Foxs release in May of a 10-point "religion platform" in which he
supported: (1) the sanctity of life from conception; (2) the integrity of the family; (3)
the right of parents to decide the best kind of education for their children-which in
Mexico is read as supporting religious education; (4) spiritual assistance in public
institutions such as hospitals; (5) a clear definition of "religious liberty;"
(6) reform of Article 130 to guarantee freedom of religious practice; (7) allowing
religious institutions to own mass media; (8) a clear definition of the tax status of
religious institutions; (9) an end to official discretion in granting permission for
foreign clergy to enter or exit the country; and (10) official recognition by state
educational authorities of secular subjects studied by clergy in seminaries.

Notwithstanding the fact that most of these positions are accepted as normal and
customary throughout the Catholic world, media reaction in Mexico was swift to condemn
them. Among commentators the consensus was that Foxs Decalogue (as it was called)
was a strategy to gain additional privileges for the Church. It was also seen as a
"great mistake" on Foxs partlikely to alienate moderate citizens who
wanted change but not at the price of granting more privileges to the Catholic Church. PAN
had simply become the Churchs political instrument.

"Fox is offering the Church the Republican tradition forged over the last 150
years, in a silver chalice," wrote Carlos Marn in the tabloid Milenio. In
Reforma, Humberto Musacchio warned that the proposals "will unleash the activity of
the moral terrorists, the persecution of the unfaithful and the lynching of
homosexuals." For El Universals Cesreo Morales (a former adviser to
sometime PRI presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio), the Decalogue was a
"threat to the climate of tolerance in which we live."

Intensely criticized for his association with the Catholic Church, Fox responded by
meeting with the evangelical Protestant and Jewish communities. On those occasions, he
emphatically declared his support for religious pluralism, inviting religious people
outside the Catholic fold to join his campaign. The media, however, focused almost
exclusively on the Catholic connection.

Foxs strategy of playing the religion card, along with the political activism of
the bishops, forced the other two candidates, Crdenas and the PRIs Francisco
Labastida, to take a stand on religious issues. Crdenas, despite his support for the use
of condoms and abortion rights in a country where more than half a million women die in
clandestine abortions every year, proposed expanding the political rights of the clergy to
include the right to run for public office. Interestingly, although not even Fox went that
far, this provoked no negative reaction in the press. For his part, Labastida declared
himself a Catholic and a guadalupano (devotee of the Virgin of Guadalupe), but declined to
take a stance on abortion or the other issues of concern to the churches such as media
ownership. In a post-election interview with the weekly magazine Proceso, he said
that "stating his position on religious matters during the campaign process was the
worst moment"but in fact the media took little note of what he had to say on
the subject.

Notwithstanding his discomfort with religious issues, the PRI candidate did not refrain
from looking for political support from the Church. As Carlos Fazio pointed out in La
Jornada in June, Labastidas contacts with bishops were "pragmatic, and were
a result of personal favors from those who had supported the political system in the
past . [T]he contacts were established through the municipal structures. The economic
donations were well received from the bishops for the restoration of the churches, and to
cover additional earthly needs." By the end of the campaign, the Mexican media were
full of stories reporting warnings by bishops and priests from around the country to
prevent the usual electoral chicanery by which the PRI had been able to ensure previous
triumphs at the ballot box.

The religious dimension of the Mexican election did not go unnoticed by the U.S. news
media, although they tended to overlook the events that ignited the debate on the
Churchs role in politics, including Foxs Decalogue. Instead, American
newspapers repeatedly served up the information that Fox and his party were rightist and
pro-Catholic in a country where a large majority of the population is Catholicwhich
was true enough, but hardly gave a clear picture of the campaigns religious
dimension. Nor were imprecisions and distortions lacking.

Mary Beth Sheridan of the Los Angeles Times wrote that "many Mexicans were
outraged when Fox used his Catholic faith as a theme in the campaign"when it
was merely the anticlerical elite that was outraged. David Gaddis Smith of the San
Diego Tribune wrote that "Fox angered the faithful because he told Protestants
they face the same kind of barrier from the Catholic Church in gaining converts that he
faces from the long-ruling PRI in trying to win voters"when this neither
bothered Foxs lay Catholic constituency nor elicited significant concern from the
bishops.

Molly Moore of the Washington Post wrote that Mexico was
"ultra-Catholic" when referring to Labastidas acknowledgement that he had
fathered a daughter out of wedlockas if that mattered in terms of popular opinion.
In fact, Mexico has a rooted tradition, common in Latin political culture, of not
according as much importance as North Americans do to the private sexual behavior of
politicians.

Among the grosser inaccuracies, Rene Villegas of Reuters put the Catholic population of
Mexico at 98 per-cent, a figure long out of date. Today, the Church itself estimates the
Mexican Catholic population at only 80 percent, and in states such as Tabasco and Chiapas
Catholics and non-Catholics are evenly divided. In a profile of Fox, Roger Fontaine of UPI
said, "Hes a Norteno, and northern Mexicans are more ruggedly individualistic;
less trusting in government, thus, less centralist, more entrepreneurial in nature and
more Catholic"but Foxs home state of Guanjuato is actually located in
(less Catholic) central Mexico.

Chris Mooney, writing in the liberal journal of opinion The American Prospect,
was very critical of U.S. media because it had under-reported Foxs conservative side
(on abortion, homosexuality, religious education on public schools), and because he used a
slogan associated with the "extreme right" Cristero rebels: "If I advance,
follow me!! If I hold back, push me! If I retreat, kill me!" Although this
observation was correct, the main issue of the presidential campaign was not Foxs
conservatism but change versus continued PRI dominance of Mexican society.

In any case, electoral results fell short of the landslide proportions that both the
Mexican and the American media suggested in reporting the PANs historic victory. For
although Fox defeated Labastida by 2.5 million votes, the PAN did not achieve a majority
in Congress. As a result, Foxs government is not going to be able to achieve any of
its goals without negotiating with the PRI. Anticlerical fears will thus be eased in light
of ongoing opposition from the PRI and a general lack of consensus in the country on
implementing Foxs religious policy.

This, of course, does not mean that the Church will not try to take advantage of its
ideological affinity with the new president. The irony is that Foxs economic
agendano different from the neoliberal policies that the PRIs technocrats have
implemented since 1982, and that have been heavily criticized by the Churchwill run
up against the traditional stance of an institution that does not see the market economy
in friendly terms. As long as Foxs promises on reducing poverty are not fulfilled,
his government will not have the Church as an ally.

However Fox proceeds, for the foreseeable future the question of allowing religion more
social space to exercise its pastoral and political activities will continue to be framed
in terms of the power of the Catholic Church to get more privileges. This will make
further constitutional reform all the more difficult, but Mexico will not come of age as a
modern state until it finally accepts religious institutions as public actors subject to
the normal and customary rules of Western civil society.